ICANN’s next meeting will be held in Barcelona from 20 – 25 October. Key highlights of the agenda include the working sessions of the Policy Development Processes dealing with issues around future releases of new gTLDs and rights protection mechanisms.

We have today announced that we have acquired Demys for an undisclosed sum. Edinburgh based Demys provides high quality corporate domain name management and online brand protection services. It delivers a full domain management service for a number of high profile brand clients across the UK automotive, retail/leisure, media and FMCG sectors.

According to the latest data from Verisign’s domain name industry brief the second quarter of 2018 saw the number of registered domains across all top-level domains (TLDs), rise to 339.8 million, an increase of approximately 6m domain name registrations, or 1.8%, compared to the first quarter of 2018.

Registry operator Minds + Machines Group Limited (‘MMX’) have announced the launch of their latest new gTLD .LUXE. Initially intended to represent luxury goods and services, MMX have repurposed the TLD to support the blockchain platform Ethereum, using ‘LUXE’ to represent the phrase “Lets yoU eXchange Easily”.

Registry operator Amazon has extended its second Limited Registration Period to 1 December 2018. During this phase, registrations are to be open to customers who own, operate, or manage bots (bot developers) built using the following botkits: Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, or Amazon Lex.